Skot Waldron:
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My next guest, Janet Williams, has a lot to offer. As far as just people interaction, she's been in the HR world for a long time. She's Executive Director of HR right now. She's been doing that past 13 years. She's a mediator with the Texas judicial system and the Phoenix House of Texas. She's a facilitator. She has just been doing a lot of things.
What I want to talk about with Janet, what you'll see here is this interaction, this what is employer/employee engagement looks like right now, the employee experience. Why is that so important? What's different in the hiring process? And then we start talking about something really interesting that I think is really, really pretty much only people in this situation could talk about it.
Janet is married to an African-American. She has an interesting perspective that she shares, and I think it's super insightful, about how racial awareness right now and what that has to do with empathy in the workplace. How does that tie into HR in the first place? Well, I think you're going to get something out of this. I'm really excited. Thank you Janet, for all of your insights. All right, let's get going.
Hello. We have today Janet Williams. She is Executive Director of Human Resources and she has a ton of experience, not only life experience, but professional experience to bring to the table for the discussion today. Super excited to have you here. You have been doing a lot in your personal life, and you've been doing a lot in your professional life. What I want to tap into a little bit is some of the things that we've been discussing. First and foremost though, as an HR executive and being in this world for what, 13 years now?
Janet Williams :
More than I like to think about sometimes.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, you've had a lot of people interaction in those 13 years. My opinion is that HR has a brand problem. HR has a perception of whether it's just being babysitters or whether it's the people that say no all the time, or it's the red tape, or just they only do conflict, whatever. Do you agree with that? In this day and age when HR is so much more. It's an integral part of us as a country, as organizations. How do you feel about that?
JANET WILLIAMS :
Yes, I think that's true. From the employee side of the table, I think that it's so unfortunate that many times when I go into a new position and start to go and try to interact with people, because I think it's so important to be, especially as the leader, very visible, that if I walk into a new place, everybody thinks I'm there to fire somebody because the perception is, "Oh no, if the HR leader is here, somebody has done something wrong and they're getting let go." That's so unfortunate, because if that's the perception, then people are not going to come to you and let you know when there's a little problem brewing. And when it's a huge problem, that's when you find out about it.
From that perspective, there's a real disconnect. And from the perspective of, on the manager's side as being there to help them with situations, the perception is yes, that you're a gatekeeper and I want to do this or that, or this employee is a problem. And they're just going to tell me, I have to go through 20 hoops to be able to let them go, which is not the case so they won't come to you. They, again, let a problem become this huge problem before it's a nip it in the bud problem. So there is a huge disconnect that HR is there to resolve conflict. Yes, but also to help you with all kinds of situations, whether it's on the employee side or it is on the organizational side and just to develop a good culture, that a lot of times they get left out of that.
SKOT WALDRON:
So, what's the difference between when you started out in HR more than a decade ago versus now? What's been the transition, the journey of HR and the people and the role that you have and the development of people?
JANET WILLIAMS :
It's really been in the type of employee that you have that comes to the table now, because when I started out in HR, there really was people were glad to have a job and loyal to the company and whatever the company was asking for them and from them, they were willing to do. And now that change has been employees, they do want to know what's in it for them. And that is seen as a negative thing a lot of the times by the executive team. And there's really nothing wrong with that. You should want to be able to have a work-life balance. You should be able to have benefits that you can afford. You should be able ... There's nothing wrong with an employee wanting to know what's in it for me in an interviewing process or a hiring process. And that is perceived as somebody who's going to be high maintenance and that's changed. That definitely has occurred. But the perception of that being a negative thing is again, unfortunate.
SKOT WALDRON:
Wow. We have transitioned and I've seen this too with generations of, it's become a, the company is sitting up there on their Hill and people are just, you should just be grateful you're interviewing with us, right? You should just be grateful of the opportunity that we're giving you to work for us. And when you get hired, we want loyalty from you. We want this, this, this, and we want you to be loyal to us. Be here for the long haul because when there's turnover, that costs us more money. So whatever. Instead, now we're getting to the point of employees using platforms like Glassdoor to analyze reviews of different companies or word of mouth or reputation to understand, do I even want to work for that type of company? Maybe they should be grateful to have me. Maybe they should be grateful to have me around, what can they do to get my loyalty, to help me be loyal to them? Like there's a mutual agreement here. Is that what I'm hearing?
JANET WILLIAMS :
Yes. And actually, let's be honest, what a company used to be offering you for your loyalty was a whole lot more than they are now, because most companies would be providing you with benefits that you weren't paying for. And if you were paying for them, it wasn't very much. And a lot of companies had stung kind of a retirement for you that wasn't whatever their matching to their 401k and better vacation opportunities. So they were a loyal because they were getting more for what their loyalty was. Now at particularly when you're talking about your people that ... In my organizations, we identify people that we call rising stars, but that this is an employee that you see as a above average employee that you want to keep and grow in your organization. You should be all right with them asking you what's in it for you and providing as much of that as you can, like a career path and maybe some educational opportunities that you'll pay for that are outside of what you might normally do, because those are the employees that can go anywhere else if they want to.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. We worked so hard at developing a product or a service that's we can sell to our customers and clients that hopefully makes them loyal to us. So they don't go anywhere else. Right. So that we, we get that recurring revenue and we, we build that brand loyalty. And then we kind of put our internal teams, our employees, and our staff and our other people on the back burner and just say, "Yeah, yeah, just produce, just produce, just produce, get on the same page [crosstalk 00:10:21]." Instead of investing in them. Instead of investing in the employees to say, "Hey, we're going to pour into you, make you the best you can be. And then we'll see that eventually bleed over into the customer interaction." The employee experience goes over and bleeds into that customer experience. And that's, what's going to create healthy cultures, healthy environments, and healthy sales for our, our companies in the future.
JANET WILLIAMS :
Absolutely because your turnover rate, as a matter of fact, I, a couple of years ago, put a two year program for an employee engagement group. That's whole ... We put so much time into our customers and not nearly enough time into our employees. So there developed a group that was only frontline employees, because no managers could be in it. And their whole role was to engage employees, find out what employees wanted, what problems they had, what was the one easy fix for a two year period of time. And the correlation between lowering our turnover and improving our customer base loyalty. And there was a direct correlation with, we changed in that two year period. Our turnover was lowered by about 26% and our customer loyalty increased almost identically.
SKOT WALDRON:
Wow. That's fantastic. That's great data.
JANET WILLIAMS :
Yeah. It is. You know, those are the people, the people that answer your phones or the first people that engage with the customer, everybody who is in HR knows that employees leave supervisors. They don't leave companies. Well, it's true for our customers too. They don't leave the executive team, they leave the person that they were engaged with while they were in your business. So if that person is disgruntled or brand new and doesn't know what they're doing or how to help them, those, they won't be back. That's how you lose your customer base
SKOT WALDRON:
Right on. Yeah. I love that. That's gold right there. I really liked that a lot. You talked a little bit about, you used that word employee engagement. And we're hearing that a lot.
JANET WILLIAMS :
That's a buzz word now. Yes.
SKOT WALDRON:
It is a big buzz word, because normally when we talk about HR, we're talking about typical problems of attendance, under-performance harassment, discrimination, those types of things that are happening, turnover, as you've mentioned before. Employee engagement, let's unpack that word a little bit from your perspective, tell us what employee engagement is, what it means and why it's so important right now?
JANET WILLIAMS :
You know, it's all of the things that you mentioned. You have to start with hiring the right person, training them when you get them in the door to make sure that they know how to do the job that you've hired them to do. You have to make sure that when they do have a problem, that they feel that they have a safe environment to bring that problem to somebody's attention, that if they have a problem ... I'll give you a good example from an HR perspective, if they're somebody that they take your benefits and they had a claim issue, they got in the mail last night that says a claim that rejected. And they owe somebody $600 or 6,000. And they know, okay, when I go in, in the morning, I'm going to take that to the HR benefit person, because I know her and she's helped me in the past.
And I'll tell her I got this and she'll take care of it or look into it. Then I'm going to spend my day at my job, doing what I'm hired to do. If I don't have that person, I'm going to spend my day trying to call people, trying to figure out why this happened. Being upset with my company. It's not the insurance carrier that something got messed up and there's no engagement in my job that day, because I'm trying to solve my problem. So productivity wise, I might encounter a customer that day that I'm going to totally blow off, be rude to, snap at because I'm upset about this problems that I had. That employee is not engaged at all for that day. And if they can't solve that problem, and they're mad at the company, eventually they're going to still try to find another job somewhere.
But it's also in knowing what it is the employee wants, because in that committee their first role was, their first assignment was to find out what employees were looking for an improvement and then make a strategy to deal with that. And one of the primary things was they felt like there wasn't enough communication. They didn't get enough communication from management. That was what they've said. Management did not give them enough communication. And so the next assignment was, what does that mean? Because they were just going to go out and say, okay, let's have town hall meetings or the CEO will send out a newsletter. And I said, did they say is from executive? What does that mean? [inaudible 00:16:17]. And so they had to go out and say ask them, you've said that this is what you want. What does that look like?
And what they found was they didn't like it because their direct supervisors would tell them the day that there was going to be a change that they're implementing it. And they wanted them to give them some notice so that they can prepare. So if you're taking a problem and solving it, and it's not the actual problem, then you're still not engaging with the employees. So you've got to understand the problem and not assume that you understand the problem. That's a big part of it also. And then when you do understand it, the worst thing you can do is say, we're doing these things because we want to help. We want to have good engagement. We want to build a good culture. And then when they have replied to your surveys, told you what they want, then you just don't do anything.
They see it. They said, okay, we're going to give you a chance. We believe you. And then nothing happens. They had a printer that didn't work on a unit that they were on and they had to walk across the building to some other printer. Nobody even knew the printer was not working, except the people that were on that unit. So you fix it, make them happy. It cost a few hundred dollars. If you think, eh, that's not that big a deal or I'll get around to it. You've made it worse because not only now you've told them, I hear what you say and I actually really don't care. You have to do something if you ... And that I think is a lot of times where you really fall is you say ... And managers get busy. That leadership gets busy. There are big problems. But if you're not going to put the time in, after you've said, we really want to build this engagement, then don't do it. You'll have our worst problem than you had when you started.
SKOT WALDRON:
Employee engagement is, what I hear is it's about listening. Engaging them, listening, establishing some kind of criteria, understanding where we are, an analysis of what we are, where we're at. Kind of diagnosing issues, seeing what's there, but then doing something about it, building trust, being authentic in that request of asking and engaging, but then also taking action. Right? Is that what I hear?
JANET WILLIAMS :
Yes, and I think the action is the big fail that you do all kinds of efforts towards saying you want to change things or build, engage, build trust, and then you totally destroy trust by not actually doing anything.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. Let's take that topic and I'm going to pivot it a little bit. Okay. This is going to still, we'll still apply this to the world of HR. That's your foundation, but I also want to bring in, I know we spoke a little bit before the interview. I want to bring in a little bit of your personal experience. So let's talk a little bit about that idea of employee engagement, of listening, of diagnosing, of understanding, and then taking action. And let's turn that to the world of what's happening right now in our society that is impacting work, by this I mean COVID, and I also mean the racial injustice that's happening. That we're being more aware of now that's happening, the black lives matter movement and other things happening. Let's talk about that in that light and how that, in your own personal experiences, how that relates to the world of HR and how that relates to the world that we're dealing with right now.
JANET WILLIAMS :
I think that every person, whether it's in their workplace or it's in their personal lives, wear all the makeup of what our own experience in life had been, all of us. And so in the social injustice, and we can talk about my husband is black, so we kind of have a broadside view of it, but we ... The problem is that people don't want to be objective enough to think that because it isn't my experience, it might actually be their experience. And so you just dismiss it without further consideration when the reality is if you've lived in a different environment, it's not only possible, but probable that their experience is actually true.
And until you can open your mind enough to the possibility of what they're saying and try to educate yourself to whether or not there's any truth to that than just assuming that there isn't, that happens within our corporate America, in corporate life, it happens in our personal life. And until individuals, as human beings decide to entertain and be objective to a different experience, we're going to continue to have problem that we have. And it's not really changed much in I was watching the news a few weekends ago, and then it's the same. You're seeing the same things occurring now that were happening 50 years ago when Martin Luther King was alive and nothing has changed that much.
SKOT WALDRON:
What is that current problem that we're talking about. As far as society now, but also how does that relate to corporate? Like, what is that problem you're talking about?
JANET WILLIAMS :
I'm talking about the problem of not understanding, or even accepting that there is a different point of view. So in corporate America, for instance, most of your people that are in the highest roles of leadership, there's a probability that they would not have ever experienced making $12 an hour. And I have to decide whether or not I can even take health benefits or be able to pay the rent on my house and keep my kids fed. So to them, if I have to pay $500 a month for health insurance, that's not a big deal. And when they're the ones that are the decision makers on what they're going to do with benefits, it's unaffordable to the point that it matters to the most. So until you can look at it with those eyes, then in corporate America, you're still going to have people that see it as a us and them mentality.
SKOT WALDRON:
So I hear, on the social side and things that you've discussed within your family, with you and your husband and, and the experiences you had, even within your own family, as we discussed before of these discussions of some people in the white population may think, Oh, that's not really a problem. White privilege, isn't really a problem. Because they've never been directly affected by that in the negative way.
JANET WILLIAMS :
Yes, for my own family. I was raised in a farming community in rural Indiana. We did not go to school with anybody that was of any other race, not even black, but it was white kids. And that was it. And so when I moved from Indiana to Texas, was a whole new experience for me and a good experience for me. But now that we have all this that's going on in our society I've talked to my sister a few weeks ago and I told her I said, "You have not ever experienced being pulled out of your car and handcuffed on the side of the road and your car searched because you were in the wrong community with a black man driving your car. But I have, that has happened to me four times in the last four or five years.
Why would I lie to you? If I'm your sister, why would I lie to you? You don't think there is white privilege because the fact that you are white and your life experience gives you the privilege of living in white privilege, but I'm your sister and I'm telling you this happens. And yet you still say, you refuse to believe that there is even the possibility of there being white privilege. Until that changes, when somebody as close to you as me tells you about it, and I'm not lying. We can't come to any kind of place where we can have some consensus and some agreement, and you're never going to see anything different than what you're seeing now."
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. So we see that it's society, this, it's never happened to me, so it must not really be that big of an issue. Or I shouldn't be that concerned with it, or I didn't do that thing to you. So it's not my problem.
JANET WILLIAMS :
Right, right.
SKOT WALDRON:
So we wash our hands of that thing. Now let's take that mindset. We're talking about culture and society. But let's talk about culture and corporate and businesses organizations. You're saying that the same ideology exists within corporations, that those in higher up leader positions may say, "Well, that's not really an issue, or that's not really a problem." There's a lack of empathy is what I hear. There's a lack of understanding, empathizing or dialogue happening enough to bring it to the attention of those that can bring change or actually take action to make the change.
JANET WILLIAMS :
Yes. And I'm talking now, just to HR leaders, let's talk for example, about people, hiring people with convictions. There are laws about that, that say that you cannot use that as a reason to not hire someone, but you can always decide that it's something else and say, we found a better candidate. And that happens all the time and it's not right. I hire people with convictions all the time, because if they blame it in a way that makes sense, if they have had time where they've not had any issues, if there's a story, if there's a reason behind it, people can actually change. People do actually make dumb decisions when they're young. So totally barring somebody because of that.
You should not be doing that. That's what's being talked about even outside of work or there's an HR, it's called a golden halo effect where you are only hiring people like you. So most honest, it's a fact that most of the people that are in leadership roles are not ethnic people. I mean, there's been studies done on it. So you're only hiring people that are like you, and that's excluding people who are very talented from being able to get into higher level jobs. And those are things that when you're in HR, you shouldn't be considering those. And I don't even think it's intentional sometimes, but for it to not be intentional, you have to intentionally make yourself aware of it. So my daughter said a statement that was so profound the other day when she was she's somewhat of a political activist.
And because she actually ... My grandson is mixed. Her husband is also of color, but you know, the truth is, it's not okay. Many, many, many white people say they're not racist because you know, I have friends that are black. That's like, so what, it's no longer enough to say that you're not racist and you don't support racism. If you don't speak out against racism, then you're part of the problem. If you're quietly sitting back, you're part of the problem. It's not enough anymore to not take a stand against racism and social injustice. And that's what we have to get people to realize.
SKOT WALDRON:
And this not only ... This whole dialogue that we're having right now is, yes, as a title HR executive, me as a communication expert, brand strategists. We have these titles, we're having these discussions, but it's all rooted in humanity. And the way that we communicate with each other either deposits into our brand account, a reputation, relationships, and loyalty or withdrawals from that account of loyalty and reputation and engagement.
And the more I withdraw from our account, because of the way I communicate, the way I interact with you, the less the morale, the less the culture. I mean, it hurts everything. It hurts culture, it hurts morale. It hurts the way that we exist as humanity and therefore takes away what we built. So how do we, on a final note, how would you suggest we unlock the potential of ourselves, our organizations, and us as humanity? What is it that we need?
JANET WILLIAMS :
We need to take that description of humanity at the value of what it actually means. That's what we need to do. If you're going to say that you are ... And I think everybody wants to do, I think at the core of every human being, you want to do the right thing. You have to examine honestly whether you are doing the right thing. And if you're not, change that. That is what has to happen. If you are not ... Be true to yourself, be honest with yourself. And if you're honest with yourself and you're not doing the right thing, then you have to change it.
SKOT WALDRON:
Janet, this has been fantastic. Is there something that you can give away to the audience? I know you mentioned something that you wanted to help the audience with more of this dialogue, more of this constructive development of who they are.
JANET WILLIAMS :
Yes. So we have a program that we have access to where I work and it's called RightNow Media @ Work. I don't know. Some people might be familiar with RightNow Media from the standpoint that they have a Christian based video library that a lot of churches are using for this very thing, social education and how to learn how to be a better person basically. But the RightNow @ Work Media is a lot of leadership training on how to be, not necessarily a manager, but how to be a leader that is a servant leader and leads with the heart. Leading in love, basically. And so I have the app. I can give access to that video to anybody who's interested in getting access to it. They just need to reach out to me and they can do that through you.
They can email me at my work email, which is janet.williams@stridecare.com, just like it sounds. And I'll be happy to send it to the link to them. And if you have any questions about anything we've talked about, I'm happy to elaborate with anyone in person privately who wants to talk further about it. But the video library with the leadership training has hundreds of video training on communicating with employees, how leaders can build communication, can build engagement. Great tools at your fingertips that's already prepared for you.
SKOT WALDRON:
I did check out that platform and it looks beautiful. It's very powerful, a lot of content on there from different angles. So I think people would get a lot out of that. I really appreciate you offering that to the audience. So I'll put your contact info in the description area so they can check that out and outside from that, I think that this has been really impactful, not only the professional, I loved how we, tying in both aspects of socially what's going on, professionally, what's going on and how it's really kind of the same problem-
JANET WILLIAMS :
It is.
SKOT WALDRON:
... from a different angle. So I really appreciate your insights and the thoughts you've left with us today. If anybody wants to get in touch with you. Information's there. Thanks a lot. Have an awesome day.
JANET WILLIAMS :
Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. Have a good rest of your day also.
SKOT WALDRON:
Thank you. I hope you were able to understand what we're trying to get across at the end of that discussion. We went from the employee experience. We went from some HR discussion into a very personal discussion with Janet and her husband and the climate right now with racial injustice happening in the world and what that has to do with HR. We talked about those things because it's all about empathy. It's all about understanding your employees, understanding your team members, understanding the people that you work with in a way that helps them feel valued, heard, understood, and creates better relationships over time, more trust. And ultimately that is what's going to help us move forward in our organizations.
Thank you, Janet, again, for being on the show. If you want to find out more about me personally, you can go skotwaldron.com. I have a whole list of other interviews there that I've been doing here in the past. If you would like to also subscribe to my YouTube channel, that would be fantastic. I would love that you can see all these interviews there, plus some additional education and old videos that I've provided you. So I am looking forward to engaging with you more. Leave a comment, like, subscribe, share, do all those things. I'm really grateful for you. We'll see you next time.
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